I never really cared for the usual colourful Easter eggs most people make. They're too gaudy for my taste. I don't like the mess involved with making them and I don't like using all that food colouring. So, for the past ten years or so, I've been colouring my Easter eggs the way my grandparents used to; using onion skins.

I start saving onion skins for a month or two before Easter... I guess that's pretty much all of Lent. If you don't have enough onion skins saved up by Easter, ask your local grocery store if you may get some loose onion skins from them.

Step 2: Wet Everything

Soak your onion skins in a big bowl of water. (I just used a small bowl since I made a single egg for this demonstration.) Be careful with your onion skins. When they are dry, they are pretty fragile and you want to keep them as large as possible.

Just dip the squares of cloth in the water, then wring them out so they are damp. Also dip the eggs in the water; it helps the onion skins cling to them better.

Step 3: Wrap The Eggs With Onion Skins

Wrap onion skins around each egg. If you are lucky, you'll have skins from the top or the bottom of an onion. These naturally conform to the shape of the egg. If not, just make sure you cover the entire surface of each egg with pieces of onion skin. The water should help the skins cling to the eggs.

Step 4: Wrap In Cloth

Place an onion skin wrapped egg in the middle of one of your squares of cloth. Wrap the cloth snugly around the egg so the onion skin presses tightly against it. Securely tie off the top of the cloth with a rubber band.

Step 5: Hard Boil

Carefully add each bundled-up egg to a pot of boiling water. Boil them for seven minutes or so, until they are hard boiled. If you happen to crack one of the eggs when you are putting them in, add some salt to the water; that'll supposedly keep the whites from leaking out of the crack.

Step 6: Rinse In Cold Water

Once your eggs have boiled long enough, carefully pour off the boiling water and run some cold water into the pot to cool the eggs down.

Step 7: Unwrap The Eggs

Carefully remove the rubber bands and take the eggs out of the cloths. Peel off the onion skins (you can toss the used onion skins into your compost). Voila The shells of the eggs will now be covered with beautiful patterns transferred from the onion skins in shades of brown, yellow, and green.

Step 8: Give The Eggs Some Shine

Wipe the eggs dry. Put a little vegetable oil (I used canola oil) on a cloth or paper towel and rub onto the eggs. The oil gives the eggs a nice shine and seals their pores which should help them fresh longer.

Step 9: The Finished Eggs

There you have it. Use your Easter eggs as decorations for a few days, then crack, peel, & eat 'em. (Ever since I was a little kid, I always crack my hard boiled eggs against my forehead!)

When you peel the eggs, you'll notice that some of the colour has bled through the shell and has coloured the egg white. Don't worry, they are still perfectly safe to eat - more than I'd dare say about eggs coloured with artificial dyes. Despite the colour transfer onto the egg whites, there is no onion taste to the eggs.

Incidentally, I have tried using red onion skins for this as well, hoping to get red coloured eggs. Didn't get any red eggs though. Those eggs looked the same as the eggs I made with brown onion skins. Go figure.

nice 'ible! I actually just posted on my blog about these, using a different method. I was wondering if it would be ok with you if I added a link to this instructable so people could see another variation? here's the post: http://forefare.blogspot.com/2010/04/kraszanki-easter-eggs.html (it's strange...my eggs came out very dark red. I think I just cooked them longer with the onion skins or something. :)

I like your technique, shortone, for a different take on this. I also like the marbling you get from wrique's. Combined like Voltron (or Wonder Twins, if that's how you roll. . .) you could have a wicked cool Easter basket!

when my family dyes with skins, we don't bother with the cloth bundles. We just toss everything in the pot and cook them till they are the right colour. Granted, the 'toss and boil' method doesn't leave the cool patterns as pictured above.

That's right, the vinegar will help keep the eggs more colorful, even after repeated washings! Sorry, couldn't help myself. It is true though that vinegar should help the dye from smudging in the wet grass or coming off on the little one's clothing... Probably not as much of a problem with onion skins as it would be with beet or red cabbage dye.

Great instructable. That's how we do it -> We wrap the egg into a pantyhose and put a leaf of parsley in direct contact with egg shell. The leaf will make bright decoration on the shell and of course it can be also from other vegatable. You should try it because looks very cool.

Using tights (stockings, pantyhose?) instead of cloth and the rubber band gets you a more even clamping/pressing against the egg for the leaves - useful if you want to try delicate ones.

As a game to play over easter, rather than cracking them on your forehead, one person holds their egg still and ther other person smashes their egg into it. Winner stays on, loser eats their egg, repeat until only one egg is left standing. Hint - there's an optimum end of the egg to use and that depends on which way up it was when boiled, and there's a trick to pre-squeezing the egg (reduces tension on the inside of the shell on impact) and releasing it as the two eggs strike (reduces tension on the outside as the egg relaxes). Mainly the older you are the better at it you tend to be, but you can pretend that there's a skill to it! ;-)

On what authority to you make this claim? I grew up on a farm, with chickens, some of the eggs were brown, some were white, no bleach involved. Also, eggshells are pourous, which would imply that the bleach would leach into the eggs. Hmmm.

That is what I have always been told, but I will admit that I have not done research on this subject. It does stand to reason that at some point they go through some sort of process, because if you will notice the eggs that you buy in the store are all white. And I believe that the last package of brown eggs I had said that they were unbleached. So that is why I said that.

Eggs sold retail in the US come in white, brown and 'red'. Here in New England, brown eggs are the norm (cue old ad jingle "Brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh!"). In parts of the South, the brown eggs are quite dark and are often called "red".

I hate to tell you this, but most supermarket brown eggs are laid in the same factory farms as the white eggs, so they taste pretty much the same (Pigment is not linked to flavor). What you should do for good local eggs is look in the organic section and see what free range local eggs you can find. I don't even mess with the supermarket for eggs anymore. Nowadays, I go to my local Agway, where a farmers' co-op drop off their eggs for a very low price (no middlemen to raise the prices). Of course, if the brown shell is just for egg coloring and you don't get out to your farmers' market/etc, go ahead and buy supermarket brown.